Introduction to BigQuery Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Beta

This is
a beta
release of BigQuery Geographic Information Systems.
This feature
might be changed in backward-incompatible ways
and
is not
subject to any SLA or deprecation policy.

In a data warehouse like BigQuery, location information is very
common. Many critical business decisions revolve around location data. For
example, you may record the latitude and longitude of your delivery vehicles or
packages over time. You may also record customer transactions and join the data
to another table with store location data.

You can use this type of location data to determine when a package is likely to
arrive or to determine which customers should receive a mailer for a particular
store location. BigQuery GIS allows you to analyze and visualize
geospatial data in BigQuery by using geography data types and
standard SQL geography functions.

Many table operations are free, including loading data, copying tables, and
exporting data. Though free, these operations are subject to BigQuery's
Quotas and Limits. For information on all free operations,
see Free operations on the pricing page.